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The Day We Chose To Be Frozen Rather Than Freeze

Another one bites the dust

We like to ski. Saturdays in January, we head to the slopes. As a rule, we try to be on the road by 6 a.m. Today? Well…today we missed that goal by about 20 minutes, and that 20 minutes left us sitting in traffic for three hours before we even hit the exit for Berthoud Pass, from which point we still faced another 45 minutes on the road before we would arrive at Winter Park. Yikes. Colorado is the second-fastest growing state, and it is obvious every time we get on a highway. There are days when I find myself looking for the ocean because we must be living in LA. It is insane. Everyone wants to live here. And everyone who moves here does so for the mountains. Great for Colorado’s economy, but miserable for those of us who have lived here most our lives and remember the good old days when only a blizzard would find you stuck in your car at a crawl for over two hours before making your ultimate ski destination.

Today we did something unprecedented in our ski history. We reached the turn off for Winter Park, looked at the traffic ahead of us and behind us, and uttered a collective NOPE. We drove up the exit ramp, made a sharp left, and merged back onto the highway headed east. We’d had enough of crawling. We’d been awake four hours and had nothing but lack-of-sleep hangovers to show for it. We didn’t have the energy left to stand in freezing lift lines for the equivalent of six minutes for every one minute we would get to dodge and weave our way down overcrowded slopes. We cut our losses. As we headed east we glanced at the vehicles standing still in three lanes of traffic heading west and knew we’d made the right choice. There will be other ski days. Skiing today would not have been worth any further effort. It took only 45 minutes to get home.

When Steve and I were new-ish parents, we forced situations. We stuck with our plans, even when what we planned no longer made sense. We were going to live our lives and barrel through unabated by trivial things like explosions of infant poop in carseats. And we suffered for our inability to take in the big picture, to default to Plan B, or to skip straight to a plan we hadn’t yet conceptualized. Maybe it’s our 15 years of parenting experience, maybe it’s a greater understanding about what matters when it comes to family time, or maybe we’ve practiced yoga for too long now but, whatever it is, we find ourselves much more flexible when life throws us a curve. I like to think that on days like this one we are modeling for our sons the value in thinking critically as situations evolve and re-evaluating plans for the best outcome. We’re living in the present and acknowledging that we can’t control everything that happens but we can control our actions.

Some days you stay and fight for what you want. You stand in a freezing lift line for the opportunity to schuss your way down a powdery slope. Other days it’s better to be Elsa and Let It Go.